Hugh Ryan – författare

A powerful and hilarious personal history that tells the true story of the queer ’90s and how it transformed queer life in the decades that followed.

“Deeply personal and engaging… A powerful reminder of the enduring importance of preserving our history and sharing our stories.” — Elliot Page, actor and New York Times bestselling author of Pageboy The 1990s were a decade of transformation. Globalization reshaped geopolitics, and the rise of the World Wide Web revolutionized technology forever. As society shifted from the analog to the digital at the turn of the century, LGBTQ life changed profoundly. Increased visibility arrived, but at a heavy cost.

In his most personal book yet, historian Hugh Ryan guides us through a pivotal decade for queer people and its aftershocks—from new breakthroughs in activism, to the early days of AOL chat rooms, and the eventual backlash to progress. Through the prism of his own experiences, Ryan maps how queer life transitioned from private to public in the late ’90s and early aughts, reshaping the challenges and possibilities LGBTQ people navigated in the new millennium. On a Greyhound bus headed to Burning Man and the glittery dance floors of clubs in Manhattan and Berlin, a timeless and all-too-common story emerges: how a young queer person chooses silence to protect himself—only to spend another beautiful, complicated decade undoing his shame.

Funny, stylish, and deliciously nostalgic, My Bad reckons with the gains and setbacks of a decade that reshaped queer life forever.

This "crucial" (The Advocate) and "compelling" (BuzzFeed) history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century. The Women’s House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City’s Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a nexus for the tens of thousands of individuals who inhabited its crowded cells.   Historian Hugh Ryan reconstructs the little-known lives of these incarcerated New Yorkers, making a uniquely queer case for prison abolition—and demonstrating that by queering the Village, the House of Detention helped define queerness for the rest of America. From the lesbian communities forged through the Women’s House of D to the turbulent prison riots that presaged Stonewall, this is the story of one building and much more: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired.